Can you take teaching too far?

This afternoon, between corporate work, I was reading Mentor:  A Memoir (Tom Grimes) and reflecting on what it is to be a teacher, what it must have been to be Grimes as he entered the orbit of Frank Conroy and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  I kept stopping as I read, thinking of my own strange methods, remembering the cookies that I'd promised myself I'd bake for students who will, among other things, be recalling first kitchens, first loved meals in class tomorrow.  "Don't you think you are going a little too far with all of this?" my husband asks me, as he watches me disassemble (again) my library in search of just the right passage for just this one student; I know it's in there somewhere.



But can you take it too far?  For here are students who want to learn, who have not yet succumbed to norms and utter everydayness, who are still seeking, still searching for their voices?